Losing my mind with 3 kids 5 and under

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss

I’ve always been a pretty avid reader, despite the fact that since I’ve had kids, it’s been pretty difficult to find the time to read for pleasure. Mostly, I’m just reading children’s books or warning labels or articles on Google about how to remove a foreign object from the human body, because my kids have stuck something up their nose or swallowed something they weren’t supposed to swallow.

I’ve been trying my best to instill a love of reading in my kids, and the boys are pretty interested in being read to, Carl especially. I’ve already detailed the harrowing account of my library story time adventures, but I find those occasionally insane experiences to be worth it, because even though we look totally ridiculous and every person in the library is probably wondering where this tribe of heathens emerged from, I’m making books and reading available to my kids. Well, at least two of them. Mallory just mainly eats the books, which is fine, as long as she’s not doing that in 18 years, at the library at her college.

Carl’s school has been celebrating Dr. Seuss’s birthday this week, and Carl has expressed an interest in reading more Dr. Seuss books. We have a few of them, and I remember how much I loved them as a kid, so I was really excited to share that with him. They were having some really neat, fun activities at his school, like making Cat In The Hat hats out of mozzarella cheese sticks and cherry tomatoes. I was in charge of supplying the cheese sticks and the cherry tomatoes, and Carl was very vocal about his dislike of “salad,” so I told him he didn’t have to eat the tomatoes as long as he made the hat. That seemed like a pretty good compromise, even though he reminded me no less than eleventy thousand times that he was under no circumstances going to eat those fucking tomatoes.

Leland has obviously taken a liking to Green Eggs & Ham, as he studies it closely.

Who am I kidding? This child takes absolutely nothing seriously.

Yesterday, we read a few classics by Dr. Seuss, and last night after the kids had finally collapsed from exhaustion, I flexed my Supermom muscle (or what’s left of it, anyway. Some days I feel like it’s seriously crumbly), and scoured Pinterest in order to find some type of neat craft or baked good that was Dr. Seuss themed. I decided on the One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish cupcakes, and I was so pleased that they actually came out looking pretty good! Miracles never cease. They were idiot proof, which was great, because I have the tendency of being kind of a pretty big idiot sometimes.

Don’t they look yummy? I can tell you based on the fact that I ate three, that they were. They’re devil’s food on the inside, and I used the colored Goldfish for the top. I mentioned to Carl that I’d made cupcakes that had Goldfish on them, and you can’t even imagine the look of disgust, was I seriously trying to feed him FISH CUPCAKES? No, kid. No. Not fish cupcakes. He should just be glad there weren’t any cherry tomatoes in them.